From Chocolate & Vicodin: My Quest for Relief from the Headache that Wouldn’t Go Away by Jennette Fulda:

I stayed at the bar until the last band finished playing at one o’clock in the morning. I went to bed knowing I now owed my body a debt that I would pay for in pain, but hoping the psychological benefit I got from hanging out with my friends would outweigh the cost. Altering my bedtime or sleeping too little or too much was like poking the headache, and now the headache would poke back….

As predicted, I spent most of Saturday in bed, occasionally getting up to pee. On Sunday I managed to drag myself to the love seat and stared at the television for fifteen minutes without turning it on. Instead of watching a show, I was entranced by my distorted reflection in the convex black screen. The headache was an unruly schoolchild throwing a tantrum, stomping around so loudly in my head that I was surprised to see that the TV wasn’t shaking.

I’d been able to stumble through the motions of my old life for the first few months of this illness, but the constant pain had ground me down millimeter by millimeter every day, like the river that had formed the Grand Canyon. … All I had was a too-small couch and a cold, quiet living room. While my body might stubbornly stumble forward through time for several more decades, it was becoming clear that my life was effectively over. The first twenty-seven years were great, but I would never be healthy enough to do anything worthwhile again.